Nostega: A Novel Noiseless Steganography Paradigm

• Authors: Abdelrahman Desoky
• Venue: Journal of Digital Forensic Practice
• Year: 2008

Steganography is the science and art of covert communications. When using a steganographic approach, if an adversary suspects the existence of a hidden message the approach is defeated regardless of whether or not a plaintext is revealed. Contemporary steganography approaches found in the literature often hide data by altering a text, image, audio, etc., that serves as a cover. Although, an alteration is still considered a noise that is introduced to the cover, a sender opts to make the alterations look subtle and hard to detect, in order to avert suspicion. However, recent advances in steganalysis have rendered these approaches highly vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks such as traffic, contrast, comparison, statistical, etc., which may be able to defeat the steganographic goal. This article promotes a new paradigm for covert communication, namely noiseless steganography paradigm (Nostega), that overcomes the vulnerabilities of current approaches. Nostega neither hides data in a noise nor produces noise, rendering the generated cover noiseless. Instead, it camouflages messages in a form of unquestionable data in the generated cover. Unlike all other approaches, Nostega not only camouflages a message but also its transmission. Examples of Nostega-based steganography methodologies are discussed.